UAE’s Etisalat has failed to make the final payment for the takeover bid of PTCL. The deadline had been extended 2 months from August to October. Etisalat’s bid was $1.96 per share while it’s nearest competitor China Mobile bid $1.066 per share–almost half. Surely Etisalat management must have felt like a bunch of idiots and their knee-jerk response was to demand various concessions (deferred payments, tax exemptions, permission to trade stock in the UAE market) to make up for their grave miscalculation. What action should be taken next?

The web host for tech.one.com.pk had a hardrive failure and the last backup they had went back to August resulting in a loss of quite a few posts. Google did have the cache of the posts for some time, but they seem to have updated their index and cache and the posts are lost.

We apologize for the loss and are taking measures to do routine backups of the database to avoid such a failure in the future.